ART CITIES:Paris-Brice Marden

Since beginning his career in the 1960s, Brice Marden living and working in different locations (New York City; Tivoli, New York; Hydra, Greece; Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania) he has continuously refined and extended the traditions of lyrical abstraction. Experimenting with self-imposed rules, limits, and processes, and drawing inspiration from his extensive travels, Marden combines the diagrammatic formulations of Minimalism, the immediacy of Abstract Expressionism, and the intuitive gesture of calligraphy in his exploration of gesture, line, and color.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Nearly 40 years ago, Helen and Brice Marden visited Morocco for the first time, setting into motion a new line of artistic inquiry inspired by the intricate architecture and late afternoon light of the city. Also in July 2015, the Mardens purchased a restored traditional Moroccan home known as a riad, an old stone building designed around an enclosed courtyard. The Mardens’ two-story home features large wood doors, stone pillars decorated with intricate mosaics and dramatic Arabic arches, arranged around a large garden and fountain. The exhibition “Morocco” at Gaosian Gallery in Paris, includes 60 works on paper, 48 of which were once contained in a workbook that accompanied the artist over the past decade. In the majority of the works, a square or rectangle is set within the white of the page, with winding lines and loose blots rendered in colored ink or gouache forming tangled grids of varying densities. Infinitely fluid, Marden’s gestures in yellow, red, and blue oscillate between foreground and background, light and darkness. The cornerstone of the exhibition is “Helen’s Moroccan Painting” (1980), a large-scale canvas titled for Marden’s wife, also a painter. The canvas is divided horizontally into two rectangles: green on top (evoking Morocco’s valleys) and burnt sienna below (recalling the red earth), both applied in thick encaustic and inspired by Marden’s memory of the landscape during a drive from Ouarzazate in 1978. An untitled work from 2018 swaps these colors, so that a narrower band of green appears at the bottom of the composition and the rest is deep red. What sets the two works apart most, however, is the vibrating veil of multicolored lines that seems to float at the surface of the picture plane in the latter painting. Brice Marden received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1963. It was at Yale, under the instruction of artists including Alex Katz and Jon Schueler, that Marden arrived at the rectangular format and muted, individualized palette that characterized his early monochromatic panels. Over the course of his career, his work has developed to reveal a range of influences absorbed during his extensive travels. The art and culture of Asia and the light and landscape of Hydra, the Greek island to which he has returned regularly since the 1970s, inform the heightened color and calligraphic gesture that have emerged in subsequent work. Testing the strictures of Minimalism, Marden’s art has reintroduced both the landscape and the figure into abstract painting while affirming his sense of connection with the Abstract Expressionist movement that preceded him.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, Duration: 4/4-1/6/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://gagosian.com